Pickup on South Street is a 1953 American spy film noir written and directed by Samuel Fuller, and starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, and Thelma Ritter.
In 2018, Pickup on South Street was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
On a crowded New York City subway train pickpocket Skip McCoy steals Candy's wallet.
Candy was delivering an envelope as a final favor to her ex-boyfriend Joey, who told her that it contained stolen business secrets.
Government agent Zara had Candy under surveillance, hoping she would lead him to the top man in a Communist spy ring.
Darryl F. Zanuck showed Fuller, who was then under contract with 20th Century-Fox, a script by Dwight Taylor called Blaze of Glory about a woman lawyer falling in love with a criminal she was defending in a murder trial.
Fuller liked the idea but knew from his previous crime reporter experience that courtroom cases take a long time to play out.
Fuller met Detective Dan Campion of the New York Police Department to research the background material of his story to add realism, with Fuller basing the role of "Tiger", the police detective, on Campion who had been suspended without salary for six months for manhandling a suspect.
[6] Fuller turned down many actresses for the lead role including studio favorites Marilyn Monroe; Shelley Winters; Ava Gardner, who looked too glamorous; Betty Grable, who wanted a dance number written in; and initially Jean Peters, whom he did not like when he saw film of her in Captain from Castile.
Fuller was impressed with Peters' intelligence, spunkiness, and different roles at the studio when he tested her the Friday before shooting started on the Monday.
Although a revised script was accepted soon after, the studio was forced to shoot multiple takes of a particular scene where Peters and Kiley frisked each other for loot as being too risqué.
In June 1954, Ritter co-starred alongside Terry Moore and Stephen McNally in a Lux Radio Theatre presentation of the story.
Bosley Crowther wrote: It looks very much as though someone is trying to out-bulldoze Mickey Spillane in Twentieth Century-Fox's Pickup on South Street, ... this highly embroidered presentation of a slice of life in the New York underworld not only returns Richard Widmark to a savage, arrogant role, but also uses Jean Peters blandly as an all-comers' human punching-bag.
Murvyn Vye, as a cynical detective, is particularly caustic and good, and several other performers in lesser roles give the thing a certain tone.
[10]The staff at Variety magazine also had a mixed response: If Pickup on South Street makes any point at all, it's that there is nothing really wrong with pickpockets, even when they are given to violence, as long as they don't play footsie with Communist spies ... Film's assets are partly its photography, which creates an occasional tense atmosphere, and partly the performance of Thelma Ritter, the only halfway convincing figure in an otherwise unconvincing cast ... Widmark is given a chance to repeat on his snarling menace characterization followed by a look-what-love-can-do-to-a-bad-boy act as Widmark's hard-boiled soul melts before Peters' romancing.